Re: [PATCH V2] kernel/watchdog: fix spurious hard lockups

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Thu Jun 22 2017 - 11:34:10 EST


On Wed, 21 Jun 2017, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Jun 2017, kan.liang@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > We now have more and more systems where the Turbo range is wide enough
> > that the NMI watchdog expires faster than the soft watchdog timer that
> > updates the interrupt tick the NMI watchdog relies on.
> >
> > This problem was originally added by commit 58687acba592
> > ("lockup_detector: Combine nmi_watchdog and softlockup detector").
> > Previously the NMI watchdog would always check jiffies, which were
> > ticking fast enough. But now the backing is quite slow so the expire
> > time becomes more sensitive.
>
> And slapping a factor 3 on the NMI period is the wrong answer to the
> problem. The simple solution would be to increase the hrtimer frequency,
> but that's not really desired either.

Thinking a bit more about it. Increasing the hrtimer frequency and
maintaining the current frequency of softlockup_watchdog wakeups, would be
probably the most trivial workaround for now.

Thanks,

tglx